Throughout the solar cycle and predominantly during the declining phase, Stream Interaction Regions (SIRs) drive space weather on Earth. SIRs occur when the Sun’s rotation aligns a fast solar wind stream behind a slow solar wind stream. Both fast wind and slow wind are compressed and heated, forming a pressure ridge driven by the dynamic pressure of the fast wind. In the frame advecting with the SIR, the high pressure region is bound by a forward wave, which propagates away from the Sun, and reverse wave which propagates sunwards. The pressure waves steepen into shocks with increasing heliospheric distance, the shocks usually form beyond Earth’s orbit. Located between the waves, the stream interface is a tangential discontinuity separating streams that were originally fast from slow. While the general mechanism for the formation and evolution of SIRs is relatively well known, the implications of the 3D structure in the inner heliosphere have not been well understood, in part due to the sparsity of in situ observations outside of the ecliptic plane.
In this dissertation, I have used the heliospheric adaptation of the Lyon-Fedder- Mobarry (LFM-helio) MHD model to simulate both idealized and realistic SIR structures in order to validate the model against in situ measurements and to elucidate which characteristics of the solar wind influence the evolution of SIRs. The LFM-helio is shown to accurately reproduce the solar wind conditions at various heliospheric distances. The simulations produced SIRs which agree with in situ observations. The simulations were used to show that the large scale shape of high speed streams driving SIRs affect the amount of heating, compression, and flow deflection. Further, for even small latitudinal separations, SIR evolution depends on the latitudinal structure of the High Speed Stream driving the SIR. Increasing the temperature at the inner boundary of the LFM-helio results in a solar wind that is globally faster and that produces SIRs exhibiting less compressive heating. Increasing the magnetic field strength uniformly at the inner boundary has an effect on the dynamical evolution SIRs whereas increasing the magnetic field strength in proportion to the solar wind speed latitudinally compresses the extent of the band of slow wind, modifying the global structure of the heliosphere.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/43246 |
| Date | 29 October 2021 |
| Creators | Pahud, Danielle M. |
| Contributors | Hughes, W. Jeffrey |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
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